Pstarr, thank for graciously including me in your oilfield educational process but please, my 60 years in the oil and gas business is kind of like dried buggars under a conference table compared to the two rock guys. I have a high school education and started in the bottom of a ditch with a grubbing hoe. Sitting on deep, HPHT wells in the middle of the ocean, or on the boards of public companies gives you the big head; I have done some of that and got the really big head for awhile myself. I took 2 Advil and got over it. Hocking your house, your pickup, selling your favorite horse, and telling the kids they can only eat roughneck ribeye for the next few weeks, to drill a well, to put your own money where your mouth is, humbles you up in the oilfield big time.
I promise you the two big bulls in this pasture have drilled lots of dry holes, messed lots of wells up they can't explain how it happened, or can't admit to. Scientists, I have found, tend to believe truth is absolute. I have not found life to be like that and I don't believe truth is absolute in the oilfield either. Geologists and engineers often end up scratchin' their respective noggins' just like the rest of us.
I got Rockman's point about drilling 900,000 Bakken wells on 2 1/2 acre spacing, whatever it was; it was rhetorical and even I got it. On that kind of spacing they don't need to be frac'ed. I went on a job one time where a well being frac'd caused 6 wells around it to belch water for 2 days one of the 6 wells about 150 feet in the air. Rockdoc is right too, of course, tight shale oil needs to frac'd; we all get that, I am pretty sure.
Try this paper on before lunch; its a good one by a graduate student at A&M, the conveyor belt for good young, petroleum engineers. Its long but don't quit. Its also kind of a lesson in...humility.
http://repository.tamu.edu/bitstream/ha ... sequence=2I like the part about two phase fluid flow in shale after bubble point is reached. That's important, I think. It implies that once saturated gas is depleted oil conductivity, recovery rates, gets way difficult and way muddled to predict. The guys trying to sell us on tight shale resources like the "type" hyperbolic curves with long fat, tails 30 years long. More sensible guys, IMO, have dialed it down a notch and use expotential type curves not as long. But man, come on, even this 'ol dumb ass knows we are trying to produce a shale as dense as a concrete foundation...who's to say that the way these public companies are gutting these Eagle Ford and Bakken wells ( and don't let anyone tell you they aren't gutting them ) eventually saturated gas is blown down, these wells go on artificial lift immediately and EUR per well goes into the gutter. And "down spacing" is just going to deplete bound gas at a faster rate. Howzbout complete frac closure in shale mudstone after a period of time? Maybe 10 years from now we are all going to be amazed that these shale wells simply quit; nada, zilch, el finito burrito. You'll be able to buy pumping units on Ebay.
Its all a guess how much oil we can wring out of this stinkin' shale. My experience in the oil business is expect the worse. Sometimes, rarely, you will be surprised, then you end up settling for what you got.
The 'E' in EUR stands for estimated.
I give the movie
The World Has 10 years of Shale Oil two thumbs down and another appendage up.
Thank you for allowing me to voice my
opinion.